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Alan Greenspan And Things Forgotten

This post originally appeared at Campaign for America’s Future (CAF) at their Blog for OurFuture. I am a Fellow with CAF.
Ah, the things we forget.This was then: Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan greenlighted the Bush tax cuts, saying that Clinton was paying down the country’s debt too fast as a result of modest taxes on the wealthy. So the Bush tax cuts for the rich passed, which immediately brought us the huge, huge deficits. Bush called the deficits “Incredibly positive news” because they would force a debt crisis.
In the 80’s Alan Greenspan’s Social Security Commission raised taxes and cut benefits on working people, providing a huge amount of revenue which was then handed out as tax cuts for the rich. And now, rather than pay back that money borrowed from Social Security from where it went, our elites are insisting that Social Security must be cut back, we must all work until 70, etc.
Decades earlier Alan Greenspan was smack in the center of the Ayn Rand* cult that called the non-wealthy “parasites,”

Mr. Greenspan had married a member of Rand’s inner circle, known as the Collective, that met every Saturday night in her New York apartment. . . . Mr. Greenspan wrote: “ ‘Atlas Shrugged’ is a celebration of life and happiness. Justice is unrelenting. Creative individuals and undeviating purpose and rationality achieve joy and fulfillment. Parasites who persistently avoid either purpose or reason perish as they should.”

Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, whose backing of George W. Bush’s 2001 tax cuts helped persuade Congress to pass them, said lawmakers should allow the reductions to expire at the end of this year. “They should follow the law and let them lapse,” Greenspan said in an interview on Bloomberg Television’s “Conversations with Judy Woodruff,” citing a need for the tax revenue to reduce the federal budget deficit.

… a humbled Mr. Greenspan admitted that he had put too much faith in the self-correcting power of free markets and had failed to anticipate the self-destructive power of wanton mortgage lending.
“Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders’ equity, myself included, are in a state of shocked disbelief,” he told the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

Alan Greenspan is in his 80s. He forgets — or at least wants us to forget. Don’t let anyone forget.The debt crisis was the plan, right there for everyone to see:

Step 1: Cut taxes to “cut the allowance” of government so that it can’t function on the side of We, the People. Intentionally force the government into greater and greater debt.

Step 2: Use the debt as a reason to cut the things government does for We, the People. When the resulting deficits pile up scare people that the government is “going bankrupt” so they’ll let you sell off the people’s assets and “privatize” the functions of government. Of course, insist that putting taxes back where they were will “harm the economy.”

So don’t forget.
—* One more thing not to forget. I mentioned Ayn Rand. Rand’s work is very popular among conservatives now. It forms a core justification for their “on your own” philosophy praising the wealthy and discarding the rest. So it is useful to explore the formation and core of this philosophy. Early in her writings Rand became fascinated with a serial killer named William Hickman. Rand wrote that the serial killer was an “ideal man,” a superior form of human because he didn’t let society impose their morals on him. He didn’t worry about what others thought and just did as he pleased.
“Other people do not exist for him, and he does not see why they should,” Rand wrote. Hickman had “no regard whatsoever for all that society holds sacred, and with a consciousness all his own. He has the true, innate psychology of a Superman. He can never realize and feel ‘other people.'” She considered these to be good qualities! And so does her cult.
This is the foundation of the modern “tea party” conservative thinking. So when you look at the modern capitalism that has grown up around Rand’s philosophy and the big corporations that are chewing up the planet to enrich a very few at the expense of the rest of us, and think it seems sort of psychopathic, maybe that’s because it literally is.Sign up here for the CAF daily summary.

2 thoughts on “Alan Greenspan And Things Forgotten”

Interesting analysis, but a little one-sided I think. You really should also point out that Clinton reappointed Greenspan to the Fed, not once, but twice. Obviously he strongly supported Greenspan’s right-wing policies, as most liberals did and still do. It’s easy to blame the Repubs for everything but it really isn’t historically accurate. Clinton, Gore, Kerry, Obama and the rest of the liberal cabal are just as right-wing as any Ann Rand devotee, if not more so.

In the 1980s, the S and L disaster started. Mr Greenspan proudly stepped up to the plate.
For $100,000 per signature, he signed letters stating that the S and L was perfectly sound. He did not examine a single statement by the S and L thieves. He just wrote letters that the magic name of Alan Greenspan overrode common sense and kept corrupt S and Ls to raid billions more.
Billions of dollars were stolen by the S and L’s that dear old Alan signed off on.
This is no secret, it has been written up in numerous books, but the MSM never say a word against this senile frog raper.
Alan Greenspan has the soul of rabid skunk, the morality of Bernie Maddox and a belief system that would get anyone else locked away for life. The senile old fool should be required to carry a sign that says, “This senile old fucker is not tied to any reality.”